In order for businesses to remain competitive it is imperative that they maintain a constant inventory of the products or goods that they are marketing or selling. Failure to maintain inventory will typically result in customers pursuing other options for obtaining similar products or goods. For example, in the retail sale of automotive fuel at service stations, if a service station is plagued by persistent fuel run-outs, consumer loyalty will fade and fuel sales by the service station will invariably suffer.
For certain industries, the problem of maintaining inventory is exasperated by secondary factors such as high-volume sales, rapid changes in product demand and limitations on the capacity to store the product at the point of sale. This is especially true of the retail sale of automotive fuel at service stations. While fuel sales will generally be high-volume in nature, it is often difficult to anticipate or predict rapid changes in sales trends. In addition, fuel stations are limited, by the capacity of the fuel tanks, to how much fuel inventory they can account for at any given time. Thus, for fuel service stations to maintain a constant fuel inventory, inventory must be monitored and delivery of fuel to the service station must be accomplished in a timely fashion. However, in this type of market simply monitoring inventory and inventory fluctuation on a daily or even hourly basis may not be sufficient to insure against run-outs. It may be necessary in this type of market to monitor the inventory data and sales rates in real-time, so that delivery of additional inventory is properly coordinated. In the retail fuel industry, proper coordination of fuel delivery not only addresses eliminating the likelihood of run-outs but also insures that fuel does not arrive at the service station until full loads of fuel can be accepted by the fuel tanks.
An additional problem for businesses that encounter ongoing environmental concerns is the ability to monitor actual or potential environmental impacting events. In much the same fashion as the inventory example discussed above, the monitoring of these events will typically require the monitoring to occur in real-time. Real-time monitoring is necessary so that potential environmental disasters can be averted. In many instances real-time monitoring is not limited to the location at which the environmental impacting event occurs but extends to real-time monitoring of the event at remote locations, such as regional or corporate offices.
Computer networking has made it possible to deliver data in real-time. However, the ability to deliver real-time data can often be impractical and economically inefficient due to factors such as, the amount of information transmitted, the communication medium used to transmit the information and the amount of processing time involved in analyzing the raw data. For example, inventory data can be monitored at the point-of sale and sent electronically to a remote home office site. In this same regard, environmental impacting events can be monitored at a remote location and sent electronically to a remote home office site. Typically, the monitoring and transmission of the data would require sending a large amount of data to the home office, by satellite transmission, and processing the data at the central office to determine the necessary steps needed to control the inventory or the environmental impacting event. This process typically would involve a home office server polling each individual remote site at prescribed intervals to determine current inventory volumes or environmental status. This system of monitoring inventory or environmental events is typically not economically viable because the large amount of data that is transmitted to the home office requires significant communication bandwidth between the multiple remote sites and the central home site. In addition, this system does not provide for true “real-time” data because the polling at the home office is limited to predefined intervals, which are typically relatively long intervals to allow for all the remote sites to be polled and for all the data at the sites to be transmitted.
The need exists to develop a system for real-time monitoring of inventory and monitoring environmental impacting events. The system should be capable of providing real-time data to remote locations in an economically viable manner. In addition, the system should be capable of implementing the necessary inventory control alarms and environmental alarms so that immediate steps can be taken to insure inventories are maintained and environmental impacting events are addressed. The system should benefit those industries where the sales of goods or products are typically high-volume, the ability to predict changes in sales rates is speculative and inventory storage capacity is limited.